tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5321098802454741892024-03-13T14:49:50.657+00:00The Story So Farby Charles MillerUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger176125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-532109880245474189.post-27471981501056291432022-12-04T21:45:00.001+00:002022-12-04T21:46:17.726+00:00Too much poetry for a novel, but perfect for Wes Anderson In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje
Apologies to the author, but I'm afraid that by the end, I found this novel annoying and pretentious. It starts well, with some vivid descriptions of boyhood in the Canadian backwoods around the start of the twentieth century. Then the story describes the construction of major pieces of infrastructure in Toronto. I thought I might learn something Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-532109880245474189.post-57773600077938062882022-10-09T08:45:00.008+00:002022-12-05T08:14:54.535+00:00What can historians hope to achieve?What do we mean when we ask what were “the causes of” a historical episode? Any answer must surely involve claiming that without that cause, the episode wouldn’t have happened in the way it did. And yet we’re never going to be able to verify that claim: we can’t do the experiment in which everything else is the same except for our suggested cause, and see whether its absence, or appearance in a Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-532109880245474189.post-14581551520559680392022-09-27T17:50:00.000+00:002022-09-27T17:50:03.031+00:00How not to deal with foreign currencyI just got back from a week in Norway. On the way there, at Heathrow, I got some Norwegian Krone and now I'm home, I went to my local currency exchange to turn what I had left back into pounds. Out of interest I looked at the figures for buying and selling - and it wasn't good news. At Heathrow, I got 2000 Krone for £232.26. Just now, I exchanged the 1550 I had left for £Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-532109880245474189.post-61792612753283496622022-07-30T17:05:00.003+00:002022-07-30T19:15:20.047+00:00A sketchy life of Turner
Turner by Peter Ackroyd
Ackroyd delivers on the promise of a ‘brief life’ (as in the title of the series of which it is a part), but the portrait of Turner that emerges is sketchy. I found myself wondering how much of a hurry Ackroyd had been in as he wrote it. The constant refrain of “this year he exhibited x pictures at the Royal Academy, called a, b, c and d”, found every few pages, Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-532109880245474189.post-87062111242864489792022-01-03T11:00:00.001+00:002022-01-03T11:01:21.296+00:00How to succeed in Victorian journalismNew Grub Street by George Gissing
Published in 1891, New Grub Street tells the story of a group of struggling London writers winning or losing in a world of journalism and publishing that was rapidly modernising - from the days when learned papers on obscure aspects of classical literature would be ‘accepted’ by fusty periodicals to one in which magazines addressed a growing working class and Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-532109880245474189.post-75708067363223021632021-07-04T11:01:00.004+00:002021-07-06T19:37:40.986+00:00Review: Chatto and Twain
Mark Twain In England by Dennis Welland
This book is not quite as it’s billed, as the author freely acknowledges in admitting that the title is “deliberately ambiguous” - but it is no less revealing for that. It is a detailed history of Twain’s relations with his English publishers, in particular with Andrew Chatto of Chatto and Windus. In passing, the wider picture of Twain’s Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-532109880245474189.post-17680446512457849882020-04-02T17:12:00.002+00:002020-04-02T18:27:11.833+00:00London has the plague again
The graph for deaths during the Great Plague of 1665 is instantly recognisable. In 2020, the numbers are larger and Coronavirus is hitting the capital about three months earlier in the year than the plague did, but the exponential growth is the same and it turns out that much less has changed in more than 400 years than you might have imagined.
I knew nothing about the plague Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-532109880245474189.post-86879149958264048552020-03-10T21:15:00.001+00:002020-03-10T21:16:44.442+00:00How the dot com boom opened entrepreneurship to all
Exactly 20 years ago, the dot com boom was at its height. The high tech NASDAQ index hit a historic high point on March 10 2000. Then the crash began, ending the dreams of countless young entrepreneurs. But Charles Miller argues that the boom left a positive legacy while the crash was just a blip.
Toby Rowland and his friend Rob Norton had never run a business. But as aspiring dot com Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-532109880245474189.post-1435155708320037402019-09-13T21:42:00.002+00:002019-09-14T09:58:48.341+00:00Testing Moneybutton tip mechanismThis may look a bit cheeky because it's the equivalent of a busker's hat at the bottom of my blog posts. But I want to see how easy it is to add a Moneybutton button to my blog.
Using the button below, readers who are signed up with a Moneybutton account can pay me a small amount - I have set it at £0.01 - by swiping the button, left to right, to drag the blue dot across the text:
<!-- This Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-532109880245474189.post-80912012108187111102019-05-07T14:56:00.000+00:002019-05-08T18:18:05.549+00:00Just the start of his long StruggleMy Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgård
A couple of things to get out of the way first: although this paperback edition from Vintage calls itself “Fiction” on the back next to the price, the blurb, just above, says “Karl Ove Knausgaard writes about his life with painful honesty.” And so it seems: on page 27 we learn that “I, Karl Ove Knausgaard, was born in December 1968, and at the time of writing IUnknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-532109880245474189.post-21237133153477863462018-11-02T14:55:00.001+00:002019-05-07T15:03:47.917+00:00Drawn together by our unhappy endingsExit West by Mohsin Hamid
If you know nothing about Exit West before you read it, you’ll have a surprise about what kind of novel it is on page 99 (out of 229 in my edition). You may be pleased or confused by the author’s audacity or you may feel a little cheated. I felt cheated - well, at least that the writer had given up on providing a powerful insight into the experience of the breakdown of Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-532109880245474189.post-89990065132660826072018-09-15T11:21:00.003+00:002018-09-15T11:38:34.319+00:00Over-trained by the BBC
Today my BBC email has been switched off, a week after I took voluntary redundancy from my staff job as a Senior Broadcast Journalist at the BBC Academy. It's the cutting of my last official link with the Corporation.
Leaving wasn't a difficult decision. Having worked in London, mostly for the BBC, for more than 30 years, my department was moved to Birmingham three years ago. We were all Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-532109880245474189.post-49414252367882088992018-02-10T11:58:00.001+00:002018-02-10T15:06:25.109+00:00Anatomy of the tech giants: an entrepreneur's take on FAGA The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google by Scott Galloway
Scott Galloway is a serial entrepreneur, now running a company that advises businesses on how to succeed against the subjects of his book - four seemingly unstoppable tech giants. He also teaches, and it's easy to imagine much of the book being loosely adapted either from slick presentations to his business Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-532109880245474189.post-16842070300636182512018-01-20T14:56:00.000+00:002018-01-20T14:56:29.251+00:00What a shame: Jon Ronson’s tour of the shamed and shamersSo You've Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson
Published in 2015, this book is already quite old in internet terms. Many of the controversies examined in it are long forgotten, except, no doubt, by the unfortunate people at the centre of them.
But its theme, the power of social media to polarise opinion and turn an unintended remark into the focus of an angry public debate, remains as relevant asUnknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-532109880245474189.post-83678997970819017272017-07-15T10:31:00.003+00:002017-07-15T11:55:49.909+00:00Let's see a final improvement to the Stag Brewery plans: more public space by the riverThere's no question that the plans shown this week for the development of the Stag Brewery site in Mortlake are an improvement on those shown in the previous exhibition in March.
Housing density has been reduced somewhat, public areas between the housing blocks are a bit wider and the proposed tower block - previously described to me as the "visual flagship" of the development - has been Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-532109880245474189.post-86080872342211866592017-04-01T14:46:00.001+00:002017-04-01T15:00:22.154+00:00Why the cat stayed in this afternoonUnknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-532109880245474189.post-60007369965409898372017-03-12T12:54:00.001+00:002017-03-12T13:00:22.140+00:00Novels in novels: the art of Canadian puttyUnless by Carol Shields
Carol Shields' clear, informal prose contains multiple levels of self-awareness about both its style and content. It could hardly be otherwise when this is a novel by a female Canadian novelist about a female Canadian novelist struggling with a novel.
Although novel-writing is not the main subject of Unless, it is necessarily the means through which the subject is Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-532109880245474189.post-75024862126029791292017-03-11T19:16:00.004+00:002017-03-13T17:22:46.074+00:00How to embed a photo or video from Google Photos on a website or blogThe good thing about using Google to store your photos and videos is that it's probably going to be around for a while and so your precious stuff isn't going to disappear if a flaky tech company closes. The bad thing is that you can't do much to organise or display things the way you want (despite Photos' unpredictable and uninvited efforts to create albums for you).
The best of both worlds Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-532109880245474189.post-91631388987206033782017-02-26T15:19:00.001+00:002017-02-26T15:25:13.959+00:00Editing in the round In my previous post I wrote about my first experiences filming on a 360 camera. Here, I want to follow up with what happened when I tried to edit - on Final Cut X.
The first question: how do you get the right file to edit?
It might seem best to take the SD card from the camera, insert it into the side of your laptop and copy the original files across. But that doesn't work: you'll find MP4 Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-532109880245474189.post-51943197009099999772017-02-25T16:30:00.001+00:002017-02-26T17:47:09.726+00:00Filming in the roundI have been experimenting with 360 filming, using the Samsung Gear 360 camera linked to a Samsung Galaxy phone.
Here are some of the things I've learnt:
Camera position is everything. When you film with a conventional camera, where you place it is just one of many decisions that will define the shot. (Along with framing, choosing the lens and focus for instance.) In 360, camera position is Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-532109880245474189.post-83546712997633314762016-10-22T09:22:00.006+00:002016-10-22T09:23:38.389+00:00Understanding treesLab Girl by Hope Jahren
This is an odd cocktail of a book made up of three ingredients, shaken or stirred together with varying success.
First, there’s the science: beautifully written, poetic but rigorous explanations of how trees grow and reproduce: like Biology A level taught by Seamus Heaney.
Second, there’s the story of how a child from ice-cold Minnesota made her way in the world, foundUnknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-532109880245474189.post-6677898194411672192016-09-13T08:11:00.000+00:002016-09-21T15:07:23.916+00:00Another dispatch from the wild frontier of the tech businessDisrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble by Dan Lyon
Disrupted fits neatly into an entertaining genre of first person accounts of the madness of the tech revolution. Michael Wolff’s Burn Rate (1998) was an early classic, a hilarious account of a dot com startup that failed to deliver the promised riches to Wolff or anyone else involved. Start Up by Jerry Kaplan (1994) and The Leap by Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-532109880245474189.post-41643677468074449732016-08-28T10:40:00.002+00:002016-08-28T11:15:41.634+00:00Money, class, luck and boredom: Trollope's convincing worldThe Small House at Allington by Anthony Trollope
The Small House at Allington is the fifth of Trollope’s Barsetshire Chronicles series, and is John Major’s favourite novel.
This is a long book: 845 pages in my OUP World’s Classics edition. But Trollope knows how to keep his readers guessing to the end. As in life, things don’t work out as neatly as in musicals.
Indeed, Trollope’s story drawsUnknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-532109880245474189.post-88764773404113595102016-07-26T17:32:00.002+00:002016-07-26T17:40:36.841+00:00Up and down the WyeI have just discovered that the panorama function on my phone's camera can do up and down as well as left and right.
You don't really get the full benefit of it on a web page. But then the other way isn't much use either:
Of course, you can click on the photograph, which displays it bigger and improves the horizonal one, on a computer screen at least.
But probably, photos that fit the Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-532109880245474189.post-11787260664082575512016-07-22T22:32:00.001+00:002016-07-23T19:50:34.175+00:00A strange coincidence of family historyWhen we got married, my wife and I bought a terraced house in West London, in an area that estate agents like to call Chiswick but is really Acton. It's near Chiswick Park tube station but the neighbourhood had historically been called Acton Green - or, locally, Starch Green, because of the laundries that used to be there.
Acton Green is a small network of residential streets bordering on the Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1